At one point, the idea of plural marriage painted a picture of harmony, spiritual duty, and shared life among equals—or so it was supposed to be. For Janelle Brown, however, that image faded long before she walked away from her marriage to Sister Wives patriarch Kody Brown.
“In our faith, when you marry into plural marriage,” she shared during TLC’s tell-all special aired on June 1, “you are expected to become more than you are.”
That expectation, she explained, was not limited to the wives. It extended—perhaps even more heavily—to the husband. Kody, once married to Meri, Christine, Janelle, and later Robyn, wasn’t just a husband to one. He was expected to nurture multiple relationships, each with its own emotional demands.
“The marriages didn’t need to be equal,” Janelle said, “because nothing’s ever fair or equal,” but it was still his role “to meet the needs of all the different relationships, right? Whatever that looked like.”
A Pandemic That Exposed Everything
Yet, that vision began to disintegrate. Christine was the first to leave in November 2021, after 25 years of marriage. Janelle and Meri followed about a year later. For Janelle, Kody’s detachment during the pandemic revealed deeper cracks.
“I think he really did—especially during COVID—be like, ‘I’m just going to shrug this off. You guys don’t like each other. I’m tired. You’re going to shorten my life span if I keep doing this,’” she recalled. “Like all of a sudden he’s like, ‘I just don’t want to do it anymore.’ He kind of threw this little temper tantrum.”
But when the tantrum ended, he found his wives had quietly exited the stage.
Janelle didn’t hold back about what she believed contributed to Kody’s downfall. Once aligned with the Apostolic United Brethren, a fundamentalist Mormon group, the family had since distanced themselves from the church—but even so, the expectations of plural marriage remained.
“He doesn’t embrace the culture, everybody has left the church,” she said. “But he is a failure as far as what’s expected of a man who enters into plural marriage.”
The Spotlight Turns to Kody
Christine echoed that sentiment.
“In the religion, in the polygamist world, if you’ve got a guy who three of his wives leave,” she explained, “it’s a problem with the man. And when you see families where the guy loses all the wives, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s him. That’s all him.’”
For Kody, that might feel like being “stabbed in the kidneys,” as he once described a previous heartbreak. When host Sukanya Krishnan asked if such a collapse was a hard pill for him to swallow, Christine didn’t hesitate.
“I think it must be,” she said. “He had this dream and this vision of everything beautiful and perfect.”
But instead of reckoning with his role in the unraveling, “He puts it on all of us for leaving,” she continued. “And it’s like before we left, it was broken. Before we left, everything had fallen apart.”
Even the Kids Saw It Coming
Even Kody’s children could see the storm brewing. Gwendlyn Brown, Christine’s 23-year-old daughter, recently shared her childhood perspective with Teen Vogue. Her words were quietly devastating.
“I felt like they should have divorced for a while,” she revealed. “I remember one time as a kid, I saw them arguing, and my first thought was, ‘I hope they get a divorce.’ What kid thinks that, right?”
As the dust settles on the once-famous polygamous family, the women who once shared a husband are stepping into their own truths—and their own peace. Whether that truth is painful or freeing, one thing is certain: the dream Kody built didn’t just crack—it shattered.
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